RAFFERTY’S FIRST IMPRESSION when Pan plunges into the thick of the gathering, dragging him and Rose in his wake, is that everyone is surface, brought to a high polish. Everyone shines, everyone glistens, everyone seems to reflect everyone else. Gold, jewels, hair, the shimmer of fabrics, the mysterious gleam of money. He practically squints in self-defense.
The men are a mixed lot, although all have the sheen of power he noticed in the poker game. Despite the occasional immaculate uniform, glittering with medals, most of the men wear suits, sober garments with the effortless drape achieved through highly paid effort. The men are mostly in their fifties and early sixties and look like they would put on a suit to pull a dandelion.
Seen from six or eight feet away, the women seem younger than the men, and some of them actually are-trophy wives or favored
Rose, her face scrubbed and gleaming, the diamonds dazzling at her throat, towers above the women and most of the men as Pan hauls her and Rafferty along behind him, introducing them right and left as proudly as if he’d just whipped them up in the kitchen. He pretends not to see the stiffness with which they are met.
It usually takes a moment for the stiffness to set in. Rafferty can almost see the thoughts chase each other through people’s heads as they first look at Rose: She’s beautiful. Maybe she’s someone I should recognize. Hmmmm, very dark-skinned, low bridge of the nose-Isaan. Oh, of course, she’s one of Pan’s little popsies.
Pan not only ignores the stiffness, he intensifies it. He has a trick of taking between both of his hands one of the hands of the woman he is greeting and then, when he introduces Rose, putting Rose’s hand into the woman’s. Some of the women manage the situation; their breeding comes to the fore, and they hold on to Rose’s hand and make conversation as though they had grown up neighbors, rather than on the opposite sides of one of the world’s widest gulfs of power and possession. The others-mostly, Rafferty thinks-those who fought their way into rooms such as these, go rigid. They actually tilt slightly backward, as though Rose smelled bad, and they snatch their hands away the moment Pan lets go.
At first Rafferty is worried about how Rose will handle the rejection, but this is a woman who stepped onstage nightly in a crowded, testosterone-filled bar, wearing little more than an attitude. The women who try to escape her learn that she is eagerly friendly, that she will follow them, puppylike, as they back away across the marble floor. She asks them the kinds of questions they would be asked in a small village: How many children do they have, how old, were the births painful, how do they get their hair to do that?
The woman Rafferty likes least retrieves her hand and wipes it on her thigh. Her eyes go to Rafferty and then back to Rose, and he can almost see the word “whore” form in her mind. “I’ll bet there’s a fascinating story here,” she says in English, for Rafferty’s benefit. “Where in the world did you two meet?”
“The King’s Castle,” Rose says, the English name of the Patpong bar she danced in.
“The Royal Palace,” Pan translates into Thai.
“Really,” the woman says, her eyebrows elevated. “Were you on a tour?”
“Oh, no,” Rose says. “I worked there. For years.”
The woman hesitates for a second, weighing the probabilities, then says, “Doing what?”
“Guest relations,” Rose says with her sweetest smile.
The woman says, “Ah.”
Pan says to Rose, “You don’t need me,” and disappears.
Rafferty snags a passing waiter and grabs two flutes of pink champagne, and he and Rose wander the crowd. There is no question that Pan was right: Rose is easily the most beautiful woman present. The yellow diamonds throw hard little points of golden light on the flawless skin of her neck and the underside of her chin. Most of the men follow her with their eyes, and most of the women watch the men, although their gaze eventually floats to Rose. But Pan was wrong about one thing: Even when Rafferty is standing right beside Rose, there
